The present invention relates generally to semiconductor devices, and more specifically, to selective dielectric deposition to prevent gouging in magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) applications.
Unlike conventional random access memory (RAM) chip technologies, magnetic or magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) does not store data as electric charge, but instead stores data by magnetic polarization of storage elements. Usually, storage elements are formed from two ferromagnetic layers separated by a tunneling layer. One of the ferromagnetic layers has at least one pinned magnetic polarization (or fixed layer) set to a particular polarity. The magnetic polarity of the other ferromagnetic layer (or free layer) is altered to represent either a “1” (e.g., anti-parallel polarity to the fixed layer) or “0” (e.g., parallel polarity to the fixed layer). One device having a fixed layer, a tunneling layer, and a free layer is a magnetic tunnel junction.